Abstract des Autors

This article draws upon evidence gathered primarily from the first two dictionaries published completely in the French language, Antoine Furetier's Le Dictionnaire universel (1690), and the French Academy's Le Dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise (1694) to measure the impact of sports, ancient and modern, on the French language in the late seventeenth century. It discusses approximately 75 sports-related metaphors and figures of speech that were included in the dictionaries. A few of these phrases were based on terms from ancient sports, but most were derived from croquet, billiards, bowling, skittles and especially tennis. The dictionaries contained no terms or figures of speech connected with rural sports such as football. The surprisingly larger number of sports-related metaphors suggests a high level of sports knowledge and perhaps participation among the wealthy bourgeoisie and city-based aristocracy of late seventeenth-century France. Verf.-Referat